Thursday, February 26, 2015

The State of the Islamic State

Today, finally, in an interview
today on “Democracy Now!,” Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The
(London) Independent, reporting from the Kurdish capital, Erbil, gives us a credible
description of life inside the Islamic State http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/26/who_is_bankrolling_the_islamic_state).
Cockburn points out that the IS now controls an area larger than Britain. They are funded primarily from among the
Arabian Gulf states. The vast majority of the armed forces of the IS are
inductees of the IS draft/conscription.Recruits from the US who aren’t fluent in Arabic are ineligible for
combat training and service.Groups
fighting the IS in Syria hate each other more than they hate the IS.Iraqi forces, mostly irregular Shiite
militias, have made no substantial territorial gains against the IS so
far.Human rights organizations are
preparing for a massive wave of refugees should the US begin to bombard Mosul.In the unlikely event that IS forces were
driven out of Mosul, the occupiers would be irregular forces—independent Shiite
militias, who Mosul residents fear at least as much as they fear IS occupiers.

The implication is clear: trying
to degrade and destroy the IS is a fool’s errand, and the threat of IS
recruitment in the US is a non-issue.Love
and peace, hal

About Me

I retired Jan. 2009 from after 33 years on the criminal justice faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. I continue not to charge for any form of public service, including speaking and consulting, and now have plenty of free time to do so on request. I do not do social networking. I regularly monitor just one email account: pepinsky@indiana.edu; my home phone number is 1-614-885-6341; my skype name is halpep. My papers and such are archived at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/findingaids/view?brand=general&docId=InU-Ar-VAA9639.xml&doc.view=entire_text.
I am known as a co-founder of "peacemaking criminology." Page proofs of my latest, 2006 U of Ottawa Press book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist, are freely available at http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf , the end of which lists my publications, nine books and over 80 articles and chapters in all, on a wide range of subjects from the international to the interpersonal level. My preceding book, A Criminologist's Quest for Peace, is also freely available at http://critcrim.org/pepinsky, and a pdf of Myths That Cause Crime is on the critcrim.org home page.